Related papers: Contact structures and geometric topology
We exhibit the first examples of exotic contactomorphisms with infinite order as elements of the contact mapping class group. These are given by certain Dehn twists on the separating sphere in a connected sum of two closed contact…
We prove that many features of Thurston's Dehn surgery theory for hyperbolic 3-manifolds generalize to Einstein metrics in any dimension. In particular, this gives large, infinite families of new Einstein metrics on compact manifolds.
This paper provides a topological method for filling contact structures on the connected sums of $S^2\times S^3$. Examples of nonsymplectomorphic strong fillings of homotopy equivalent contact structures with vanishing first Chern class on…
The purpose of this paper is to introduce Liouville hypersurfaces in contact manifolds, which generalize ribbons of Legendrian graphs and pages of supporting open books. Liouville hypersurfaces are used to define a gluing operation for…
We give simple characterizations of contact 1-forms in terms of Dirac structures. We also relate normal almost contact structures to the theory of Dirac structures.
In this paper we extend Thurston's hyperbolic Dehn surgery theorem to a class of geometrically infinite hyperbolic 3-manifolds. As an application we prove a modest density theorem for Kleinian groups. We also discuss hyperbolic Dehn surgery…
The goal of this article is to survey recent developments in the theory of contact structures in dimension three.
These notes are intended to be an introduction to the use of approximately holomorphic techniques in almost contact and contact geometry. We develop the setup of the approximately holomorphic geometry. Once done, we sketch the existence of…
The first author in recent work with D. Gay developed the notion of a Morse structure on an open book as a tool for studying closed contact 3-manifolds. We extend the notion of Morse structure to extendable partial open books in order to…
We introduce and analyze the characteristic foliation induced by a contact structure on a branched surface, in particular a branched standard spine of a 3-manifold. We extend to (fairly general) singular foliations of branched surfaces the…
We classify tight contact structures on the small Seifert fibered 3--manifold M(-1; r_1, r_2, r_3) with r_i in (0,1) and r_1, r_2 \geq 1/2. The result is obtained by combining convex surface theory with computations of contact…
We investigate the local geometry of a pair of independent contact structures on 3-manifolds under maps that independently preserve each contact structure. We discover that such maps are homotheties on the contact 1-forms and we discover…
We study low-dimensional problems in topology and geometry via a study of contact and Cauchy-Riemann ($CR$) structures. A contact structure is called spherical if it admits a compatible spherical $CR$ structure. We will talk about spherical…
We continue our study of contact structures on manifolds of dimension at least five using complex surgery theory. We show that in each dimension 2q+1 > 3 there are 'maximal' almost contact manifolds to which there is a Stein cobordism from…
Emmanuel Giroux showed that every contact structure on a closed three dimensional manifold is supported by an open book decomposition. We will extend this result by showing that the open book decomposition can be chosen in such a way that…
The main theorem of this paper is a generalisation of well known results about Dehn surgery to the case of attaching handlebodies to a simple 3-manifold. The existence of a finite set of `exceptional' curves on the boundary of the…
A combinatorial condition is obtained for when immersed or embedded incompressible surfaces in compact 3-manifolds with tori boundary components remain incompressible after Dehn surgery. A combinatorial characterisation of hierarchies is…
We study fillings of contact structures supported by planar open books by analyzing positive factorizations of their monodromy. Our method is based on Wendl's theorem on symplectic fillings of planar open books. We prove that every…
We study the effect of surgery on transverse knots in contact 3-manifolds. In particular, we investigate the effect of such surgery on open books, the Heegaard Floer contact invariant, and tightness. The overarching theme of this paper is…
Given two open books with equal pages we show the existence of an exact symplectic cobordism whose negative end equals the disjoint union of the contact manifolds associated to the given open books, and whose positive end induces the…